Portable computing devices, such as cell phones, personal digital assistants, and portable media players have become popular personal devices due to their highly portable nature, their ability to provide accessibility to a large library of stored media files, their interconnectivity with existing computer networks, and their ability to pass information to other portable computing devices and/or to centralized servers through phone networks, wireless networks and/or through local spontaneous networks such as Bluetooth® networks. Many of these devices also provide the ability to store and display media, such as songs, videos, podcasts, e-books, maps, and other related content and/or programming. Many of these devices are also used as navigation tools, including GPS functionality. Many of these devices are also used as personal communication devices, enabling phone, text, picture, and video communication with other similar portable devices. Many of these devices include touch screens, tilt interfaces, voice recognition, and other modern user input modes. As a result, the general social trend within industrial societies is that every person does now or soon will maintain at least one such multi-purpose electronic device upon their person at most times, especially when out and about.
While such devices allow accessing information and person to person communication, they do not provide any unique tools and infrastructure that specifically enable groups of electronically networked individuals to have a real-time group-wise experience that evokes the group's collaborative intent and intelligence. Hence, there is a substantial need to provide tools and methods by which groups of individuals, each having a portable computing device upon their person, to more easily contribute their personal will/intent to an emerging collaborative consciousness, allowing the group to collectively answer questions or otherwise express their group opinion in real-time. Furthermore, there is a need to provide tools and methods that enable groups of users to be informed of the group opinion that is emerging in real-time. The present invention, as described herein, addresses these and other deficiencies present in the art.
There exists the possibility to form groups such that messages are sent to every member of the group in current mobile telephony. Due to the distributed nature of the group membership, there's no way for a member of the group to remove themselves from the group. This leads to frustration on the part of the individuals who must process the messages sent to a group they no longer wishes to be a part of. What is missing is the ability to easily maintain group membership and relate relevant information among the group.